Lockdown incident

In the episode, Lockdown. The blast doors descend, sealing off the living quarters from the rest of the hatch.

Chronology of the lockdown

• Possibly unrelated: The countdown timer reaches zero, displaying hieroglyphics and initiating a mysterious mechanical process until apparently deactivated by pushing the button.
  • However, the man known as Henry Gale, who lies 99% of the time, claims to NOT have entered the numbers into the computer. If he is to be believed, the hieroglyphs simply returned to 108 after a while.
    • Since Live Together, Die Alone explained what happens when you don't press the buttons, it's clear that Gale lied this time as well.
• A garbled message by a female speaker, ending in a countdown to zero, is broadcast through the station's loudspeaker system.
  • The female voice said: "20 minutes to lockdown"; "17 minutes to lockdown"; "Please proceed...protocol...please proceed..."; "9...8...7...6"; "5...4...3...2...1"; Source:www.lost-tv.com
    • (Female broadcast by voice talent Lynnanne Zager)
• The blast doors descend (but not in unison), sealing the living area of the bunker.
• The power is disrupted (lights flicker)
• When the countdown timer again reaches zero without completing the protocol, the lights go out entirely and a mechanical "revving up" sound can be heard.
• A different set of ultraviolet 'black' lights that run vertically along the corners of the bunker illuminates what appears to be a color-coded map of the island on one of the blast doors.
• The counter resets to 108. The power returns about 20 seconds later and the blast doors retract into the ceiling.
• At approximately the same time as the lockdown, a large pallet of DHARMA-branded provisions lands by parachute, with a flashing beacon, near the entrance to the bunker. This appears to be a restocking procedure and may be connected to the lockdown. As seen on the blast door map: "ACTIVITY MINIMAL DURING LOCKDOWN AND RESTOCKING PROCEDURES".

Other lockdown incidents

• As revealed in Live Together, Die Alone, Kelvin and Desmond regularly tricked the system in to forcing a lockdown to work on the blast door map.
• In Live Together, Die Alone, Desmond forced a lockdown to lock Locke and Desmond in, and lock Eko out, so that they could intentionally let the timer run out.

Theories

• Perhaps the lockdown has nothing to do with the flight 815 folks and instead was initiated by the failure to push the button (or doing/not doing something else) at one of the other bunker sites (hence the woman's voice and the countdown). It would make sense to have redundancy built into a system like this and should one site fail to perform their task, all sites would lock down to protect the inhabitants from whatever it is that happens if you don't push the button.
• The female voice said "Please repeat ****al" twice before starting the countdown
• It would appear that the blast doors are meant to protect the inhabitants from an outside threat, as opposed to containing them, as mere bars such as those used in prisons would easily seal off access.
  • This is supported by the fact that Henry Gale was able to exit the area via the air ducting system; something not likely to be engineered into a prison.
  • The venting system means that the interior was not airtight.
  • The outside threat is unlikely to be gasious in nature such as the black smoke since a gas could enter the same way that Henry Gale exited.
• If it is of such importance that the button is pressed, then it follows to ask why inhabitants would be sealed off from access to the button, especially in the last four minutes of the cycle. It seems to create a contradiction of the system established within the hatch. (Unless the prompt that appeared on the computer at Countdown Timer Minute 47 was supposed to be used to reset the counter in anticipation of the lockdown.) In ?, we learn that the Pearl Station is set up to observe the actions of the inhabitants of other hatches, and is implied that pushing the button isn't as important as those in the Swan have been led to believe. Therefore, the lockdown may occur only to allow the observers to see how the button-pushers react to being prevented from performing actions they've been told are of vital importance.

It's not clear what caused this incident, it's also not clear how often they occur. They might be:

• Random (as speculated by Locke)
• Related to the concurrent supply drop procedure — the blast door map even mentions "LOCKDOWN AND RESTOCKING PROCEDURES" — perhaps to ensure that hatch residents don't leave during the drop.
  • For their safety?
  • So they don't see the plane/delivery system?
  • To see where the supplies come from if not by plane (perhaps from somewhere else on the island)?
  • Perhaps pushing the button somehow causes planes, boats & balloons to crash on the island, and the lockdown occurs to prevent them from crashing the supply plane?
  • The countdown does however give the hatch residents ample time to leave the Hatch.
    • Hatch residents can bypass the locked-down living space by crawling over the blast walls via the ductwork to the computer room, but it is unknown whether that area is also locked-down.
• Punishment for not pushing the button in time a few days earlier.
• Somehow initiated by the Henry Gale imposter as retaliation for his treatment
• Why is the computer room shut off from the rest of the hatch during the countdown?
  • It would seem like the button pusher is meant to be in the computer room when the lockdown occurs because the lockdown coincides with the timer counting down to zero.
• When the computer room is in Lockdown mode the geodesic dome functions as a Faraday cage.[1]
• Punishment because Michael communicated with "Walt" using the computer, even though he was not supposed to.
• One is meant to be in the living room at the time, so that he/she is given privacy, possibly to work on the map that appears on the blast door.
• The "supply drop" might not actually be dropped from the sky, but instead delivered from another location of the island. If this was the case, then the blast doors would descend to prevent the people in the hatch from coming into contact with whoever delivers the supplies.
• The drops might sometimes include high explosives. If the drop lands near an open set of doors and detonates from the landing event, the inhabitants could be killed by direct or indirect exposure to the explosion. The blast doors would mitigate the inherent risk from dropping explosives.
• Because the Hatch was ostensibly retasked from research (whatever the Pearl was observing) after the Incident, the blast doors could be a leftover from that role. And because there is some sort of vaccine being used by the inhabitants of the island, the dropping of the blast doors and the use of germ-killing ultraviolet light could be a cobbled together decontamination protocol, designed to sterilize the hatch before restocking from the supply drop. This would explain the ad nauseum warnings via the loud speakers.
  • In Live Together, Die Alone, the Pearl is revealed to be the real psychological experiment, and the Swan is shown to have a real function. The Swan is however apparently retasked from electromagnetic research (that caused the "leak" that leads to the present day button-pushing protocol).